Various arguments on the ethics of Damien Hirst's art

Damien Hirst's collection of dead animals and human fragments, either already dead or killed for his art, make up quite a bit of complaints from animal rights groups, and people who think about ethics and whatnot.  

Here lies the article from artnet, in which they counted every animal and animal fragment used in Damien's art (which involved the slow process of counting every single butterfly on Hirst's Kaleidoscope Paintings (2012) (http://www.damienhirst.com/texts1/series/kaleidoscope)

: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/damien-whats-your-beef-916097

The count tallied up to 913,450 animals (though that includes forty-seven pork sausages and the skeleton of an extinct wholly mammoth).  It ends with this quote from Hirst, which he said sometime in 1995 when they gave him the turner prize: "It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-level art, a twisted imagination, and a chainsaw."

Here's another one, from the Telegraph, entitled "Damien Hirst Condemned for Killing 9,000 Butterflies in the Tate Show", with mixed perspectives on how much blame and shame should be put on Damien for the deaths of the 9,000 butterflies.  Some have argued that  obviously, butterflies aren't meant to be trapped in an art gallery their entire lives, and if Damien hadn't decided to use a lot of live butterflies as means of art in the first place, then they would have been less likely to get killed via landing on the shoulders of visitors to the exhibition and having their butterfly legs break when they are brushed off.  

Others pointed out that the particular species of butterfly were chosen to be able to survive in a windowless indoor room and sit on bowls of fruit.  

I suspect that a lot of the controversy in this debate is because of how Damien Hirst is associated with killing animals on purpose.  If 9,000 butterflies in, say, a tropical conservatory that had plants in it and was supposed to be a place for endangered butterflies to be protected, it would have been viewed differently than in a context of art by the same person who killed a zebra.     https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/9606498/Damien-Hirst-condemned-for-killing-9000-butterflies-in-Tate-show.html

This last one is by The Conversation, called "Damien Hirst Insults the Dignity of the Dead."  It discusses the extent ethics should be allowed to decide what artists can and cannot do; the journalist's opinion is that even though art is, in a way, a freedom of speech and whatnot, it shouldn't be hidden from the comment of ethics.  http://theconversation.com/damien-hirst-insults-the-dignity-of-the-dead-16210

In a way, this makes sense, as there can be a separation between 

1.) the idea the artist is trying to show through their art (e.g. "death is actually a celebration of life" according to Hirst) and 

2.) What materials are used and how it is carried out (e.g. killing a shark and a lot of butterflies). 

With that, it could be possible to do number one without number two.  All the same, one can understand why using dead creatures in art might be appealing to Hirst, what with it probably attracting a whole lot more attention to him as an artist than he would have otherwise if he displayed his artistic philosophy of death some other way.